I am formally requesting that Cancer retract an article claiming that psychotherapy delays recurrence and extends survival time for breast cancer patients. Regardless of whether I succeed in getting a retraction, I hope I will prompt other efforts to retract such articles. My letter appears later in this post.

In seeking retraction, I cite the standards of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) for retraction. Claims in the article are not borne out in simple analyses that were not provided in the article, but should have been. The authors instead took refuge in inappropriate multivariate analyses that have a high likelihood of being spurious and of capitalizing on chance.

The article exemplifies a much larger problem. Claims about innovative cancer treatments are often unsubstantiated, hyped, lacking in a plausible mechanism, or are simply voodoo science. We don’t have to go to dubious websites to find evidence of this. All we have to do is search the peer-reviewed literature with Google Scholar or PubMed. Try looking up therapeutic touch (TT).

I uncovered unsubstantiated claims and implausible mechanisms that persisted after peer review in another blog post about the respected, high journal-impact-factor (JIF = 18.03) Journal of Clinical Oncology. We obviously cannot depend on the peer review processes to filter out this misinformation. The Science-Based Medicine blog provides tools and cultivates skepticism not only in laypersons, but in professionals, including, hopefully, reviewers who seem to have deficiencies in both. However, we need to be alert to opportunities not just to educate, but to directly challenge and remove bad science from the literature. (more…)

Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO) is a high impact journal (JIF > 16) that advertises itself as a “must read” for oncologists. Some cutting edge RCTs evaluating chemo and hormonal therapies have appeared there. But a past blog post gave dramatic examples of pseudoscience and plain nonsense to be found in JCO concerning psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) and, increasingly, integrative medicine and even integrations of integrative medicine and PNI. The prestige of JCO has made it a major focus for efforts to secure respectability and third-party payments for CAM treatments by promoting their scientific status and effectiveness.

Once articles are published in JCO, authors can escape critical commentary by simply refusing to respond, taking advantage of an editorial policy that requires a response in order for critical commentaries to be published. An author’s refusal to respond means criticism cannot be published.

Some of the most outrageous incursions of woo science into JCO are accompanied by editorials that enjoy further relaxation of any editorial restraint and peer review. Accompanying editorials are a form of privileged access publishing, often written by reviewers who have strongly recommended the article for publication, and having their own PNI and CAM studies to promote with citation in JCO.

Because of strict space limitations, controversial statements can simply be declared, rather than elaborated in arguments in which holes could be poked. A faux authority is created. Once claims make it into JCO, their sources are forgotten and only the appearance a “must read,” high impact journal is remembered. A shoddy form of scholarship becomes possible in which JCO can be cited for statements that would be recognized as ridiculous if accompanied by a citation of the origin in a CAM journal. And what readers track down and examine original sources for numbered citations, anyway?(more…)